Power, Freedom, and Voting

439 Pages·2008·3.993 MB·English

by  Matthew Braham (auth.), Dr. Matthew Braham, Dr. Frank Steffen (eds.)

Power, Freedom, and Voting
M.J.H.,35(cid:117)27cm,watercolour/paper,KatharinaKohl,2007.
·
Matthew Braham Frank Steffen
(Editors)
Power, Freedom, and Voting
Essays in Honour of Manfred J. Holler
123
Dr.MatthewBraham Dr.FrankSteffen
FacultyofPhilosophy TheUniversityofLiverpool
UniversityofGroningen ManagementSchool
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Preface
The chapters in this volume are intended to honour the career and work of
Manfred J. Holler by presenting a body of work in economics, political sci-
ence, and philosophy that is intimately related to some of the major themes
that have occupied his attention for the past twenty-five years or so. Some of
the chapters are developments of topics that Holler has consistently worked
on during his career (power indices, voting rules, principles and appli-
cations of game theory); others are on topics that currently occupy his at-
tention (freedom and responsibility). We even include an essay by Holler
on the quintessential theorist of power: Niccolò Machiavelli. For those who
know Manfred personally, the breadth of viewpoints and methods that can
be found in this volume should come as no surprise. His academic career is
depicted by intellectual diversity and experimentation: he has published
papers in many branches of economics that can be classified as purely theo-
retical, as applied theory, as empirical, and historical.
The person who has provoked this book was born on 25 July 1946 in
Munich, Germany, where he grew up and completed his secondary and
university education: MA in economics (1971), doctoral degree (1975), and
Habilitation (1984), the last of which is a post-doctoral qualification (the so-
called ‘second book’) that until recently was generally required by German
universities for appointment to a professorship. After a senior research and
lecturing position in Munich, Holler took up an associate professorship in
economics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in 1986. In 1991 he was
appointed as full professor of economic theory at the University of Ham-
burg where, at the time of writing, he still works.
The German university landscape has often received bad press for the
hierarchical and rigid structures and fiefdoms that Herr Prof. Dr. carves out
and jealously guards, even at the expense of the openness and frankness re-
quired for healthy academic discourse and development. While this is un-
doubtedly true, the same landscape -- which is now rapidly disappearing in
the process of turning German universities into degree factories – has an-
other side. Depending on the personalities that are able to find their way
into the niches of German universities, they could be equally hospitable for
an entirely different form of academic life. Holler’s niche is an open and
academically and educationally progressive one. In the words of the great
American philosopher John Dewey, it is a place of ‘connected experiences’.
The autonomy of the traditional German university Lehrstuhl meant that
such niches can also be the ideal environment for creative and highly
individual endeavour. One of the very important characteristics of the
vi Matthew Braham and Frank Steffen
Institute of SocioEconomics (the Anglicized name that Holler gave to his
Lehrstuhl) is that it is refreshingly free of rules and regulations. As long as we
have known Manfred, he has always made every effort to free his staff from
unnecessary administrative burdens and he never burdened anyone with his
own work. For him, it was important to ensure that there was sufficient time
to do what is supposed to be done in universities: read, think, experiment,
and write. Even the mundane task of setting exam questions and marking
was a collaborative and intellectually stimulating exercise. Manfred has been
very suspicious of targets, research clusters, and endless creation of new
fangled ways of managing academic life. For him, it is a matter of providing
time and encouragement to initiate and organize research activities on
one’s own initiative. Over the years we organized workshops from Siena to
the Isle of Sylt in the North Sea. Many of the authors in this volume con-
tributed to these events so that in some sense this volume records the recent
history of the Institute of SocioEconomics.
Both of us have known Holler closely from our days as his doctoral stu-
dents and have been greatly affected and influenced by his intellectual gen-
erosity. We wanted to repay this charity by not only putting together a Fest-
schrift but also an event that is close to his heart: the combination of art and
science. Thus the idea of a Festschrift conference with an art event was con-
ceived in the autumn of 2004 and organized as a secret together with Man-
fred’s wife, Barbara Klose-Ullmann. For the days of 17–20 August 2006,
about a month after Manfred’s sixtieth birthday most of the contributors
met at the Elsa-Brändström-Haus, a villa and former residence of the War-
burg family on the banks of the River Elbe just outside Hamburg, to present
and discuss early drafts of the papers. Not only did we exhibit some artworks
by a couple of Manfred’s artist friends in the main conference room, but we
also dedicated an evening to two artists to present their work. Nicola Atkin-
son-Davidson presented her piece, ‘Thank You for Shopping with Us! (And
Have a Nice Day?)’, which is best described as a piece of social sculpture à la
Beuys. The piece centred on an installation: a fan and an empty plastic bag.
It was about establishing an interaction among the audience and the social
environment. Alex Close presented the ‘essence of a container’. This es-
sence is documented in his essay entitled ‘Container Manifesto: Or Why
Boxes Have to be Closed’. We cannot go into detail here about these works,
but details can be found on www.nadfly.com and Alex’s manifesto will be
published in 2008 in Homo Oeconomicus, a journal that Manfred founded
and edits together with one of us (m.b.) and Hartmut Kliemt.
As it is not possible to represent the great variety of Manfred’s work in
one volume, we decided to restrict our attention to that area of his work
which overlaps with our own interests. Hence the focus of this book on
foundational issues in the analysis of power, freedom, and voting. However,
even such a thematic restriction posed a number of problems. The mere
number of friends and colleagues that Manfred has who work in this area
Preface vii
meant that we could easily have produced a second 400 page tome. With
the help of some of his close friends and collaborators down the years we
decided to invite those who have either been co-authors, co-editors, or con-
tributors to his numerous and diverse projects. In addition we wanted ob-
tain a representative historical and geographical spread of friends that have
spanned his career. We also wanted the book to capture more than Man-
fred’s past; the idea being that it should also be a continuation of his own
projects in this field.1 Here we took the liberty of inviting a few contributors
who in some capacity became closely involved with the Institute of Socio-
Economics from 2000 onwards.
Although it would have been aesthetically pleasing to compile this vol-
ume into distinct parts, the overlapping themes made any division of chap-
ters arbitrary. As readers familiar with the literature on power indices will
know, discussions of power are intimately related to discussions of voting
rules and vice versa. And we cannot easily separate discussions of power
from discussions of coalitions; and nor can we discuss freedom without any
reference to power. Thus, at most we have grouped chapters together that
are closely related. Otherwise there is no particular order. We can now turn
to a brief description of the contents.
The Festschrift opens with a chapter that is very close to Manfred’s current
interests: the nature and measurement of responsibility. That challenge that
is set out in Chapter 1 by one of the editors (m.b.) is a very abstract one:
how to untangle ascriptions of social power and causation and explicate the
difference in their meaning. As the reader will see from the acknowledge-
ments and references this is the continuation of work that was jointly initi-
ated with Manfred. The main thrust of the paper is the introduction of a
game theoretic framework to formulate a demarcation principle and dem-
onstrate that social power is a special case of social causation. One of the in-
teresting results of this analysis for normative theory is that it is shown that
an agent can make a causal contribution to some state of affairs although be
entirely powerless with respect to that state of affairs. This of course raises
the question of whether power is an appropriate criterion for attributing
responsibility.
In the next chapter (2), written by František Turnovec, Jacek Mercik, and
Mariusz Mazurkiewicz, Felsenthal and Machover’s ‘I-power’ (power as ‘in-
fluence’) and ‘P-power’ (power as ‘prize’) distinction is subjected to a pene-
trating analysis. The authors argue that the classification of the Banzhaf
index as I-power and the Shapley-Shubik index as P-power, and therefore
Felsenthal and Machover’s disqualification of the Shapley-Shubik index for
particular kinds of analyses, does not hold. Both measures can be modelled

1 In the 1980s, he edited two volumes that overlap with this one: Power, Voting, and Voting
Power (Physica Verlag, 1982) and Coalitions and Collective Action (Physica Verlag, 1984). More
recently, together with Guillermo Owen he edited Power Indices and Coalition Formation (Kluwer,
2001).
viii Matthew Braham and Frank Steffen
as values of cooperative games and as probabilities of being ‘decisive’ with-
out reference to game theory at all. The basic point being that ‘pivots’
(Shapley-Shubik index) and ‘swings’ (Banzhaf index) can be taken as spec-
ial cases of a more general concept of ‘decisiveness’. The authors complete
their study by introducing a more general measure of a priori voting power
that covers the Shapley-Shubik, Banzhaf, and Holler’s Public Good indices
as special cases.
In Chapter 3, Dan Felsenthal and Moshé Machover continue their stud-
ies of the expediency and stability of alliances by examining a co-operative
non-transferable utility game that is derived from a simple voting game. In
this game, a strategy is the formation of an alliance in the simple game and
the payoffs are the Penrose voting powers in the resulting composite voting
game. Felsenthal and Machover highlight a number of paradoxical out-
comes that can occur under super-majority rules and how a dummy player
can be empowered by participating in an expedient alliance.
Chapter 4 by René van den Brink and the other editor (f.s.) is the result
of a quite a number of years of painstaking investigation. It is a solution to a
puzzle that f.s. started working on for both his MA and doctoral theses
under Manfred’s supervision. The question is simple, the answer somewhat
complicated: how to measure power in a hierarchy given the sequential
nature of decision-making in such structures? The solution is an analogue
of the Banzhaf index for extensive game forms. Although for some this will
not come as a real surprise, deriving such an analogue is not a straight-
forward affair because the precise meaning of a ‘swing’ in an extensive
game form is far from obvious. Understanding power in hierarchical struct-
ures requires the integration of a variety of conceptual and formal frame-
works.
Cesarino Bertini, Gianfranco Gambarelli, and Izabella Stach take up one
of Holler’s favourite themes in Chapter 5: the construction of new power
indices. They define and axiomatize what they call the Public Help Index –
although it is questionable if this can really be called a ‘power index’ given
that it assigns a positive value to a dummy player. The paper’s significance is
that it fills in a logical gap in the axiomatics of power measures based on
simple games. The authors also provide an algorithm for their new index as
well as for Holler’s Public Good Index.
Stefan Napel and Mika Widgrén’s (Chapter 6) analysis of power in the
UN Security Council is written in a refreshingly unconventional style. They
set up their analysis as a football match between two teams: the local (cid:89)-team,
their own strategic power index, and the renowned Princeton (cid:71)-team, the
Shapley-Shubik index. The match ends in a draw as Napel and Widgén are
able to show that the Shapley-Shubik index is a special case of their index –
this result is the equalizing goal scored with the last kick of the game. By the
assumptions of the model, the values generated by the two indices are the
same. But hinting at their belief in the superiority of their index, the (cid:89)-team
Preface ix
calls for extra time. The chapter has all the merits of the perfect Festschrift
contribution, being a playful but rigorous analysis that is littered with anec-
dotes of the intellectual life in Hamburg over the last years and hints at pro-
vocative debates among a number of the contributors to this volume. For
the record, the presentation of this paper was actually done as a staged per-
formance with two commentators taking on the roles given in the chapter.
Chapter 7, by Guillermo Owen, Ines Lindner, and Bernie Grofman, is
concerned with modified power indices for indirect voting, such as in the
US Electoral College. The authors demonstrate the need, and propose a
method for, modifying classical measures such as the Shapley-Shubik and
Banzhaf indices for dealing with this kind of institutional arrangement. The
problem with the classical measures for indirect voting is that they generate
counter-intuitive results are due to their insensitivity to important features
of the voting environment. In the case of the Electoral College, it is the in-
sensitivity to voter correlation in the different US states.
In another very original empirical analysis (Chapter 8), Joe Godfrey and
Bernie Grofman apply the Shapley-Owen value, the spatial analogue of the
Shapley value, to test the hypothesis that lobbying efforts are directed to po-
tentially pivotal voters. To do this they examine the lobbying activities sur-
rounding the 1993 Clinton Health Care reform proposal. Apart from the
unique attempt of using the Shapley-Owen value on historical data the value
of the study is that the authors are able to pinpoint key players in the proc-
ess who lobbyists failed to identify as important.
Vincent Chua and Dan Felsenthal’s chapter (9) continues the thread of
contributions on the empirical analysis of power. They put Robert
Aumann’s coalition formation hypothesis to test. In an interview, Auman
had hypothesized that a party charged with forming a governing coalition
will choose the coalition that maximizes its Shapley-Shubik index value.
Chua and Felsenthal examine three versions of the hypothesis and find that
for each version the hypothesis is actually outperformed by different conjec-
tures: the Leiserson-Axelrod closed minimal range theory and the Gamson-
Riker minimum size principle.2
In their chapter (10), Friedel Bolle and Yves Breitmoser take up the rela-
tionships among coalition formation, agenda selection, and power. They
develop a model of coalitional bargaining in which a formateur asks the
other parties about their aspirations from participating in a government.
The authors then show how the value functions can lead to structurally dif-
ferent predictions of the outcome and assessments of power. They tie up
their chapter by looking at the relationship between their conception of
power and the power index introduced by Napel and Widgrén.
Werner Güth, Hartmut Kliemt, and Stefan Napel’s chapter (11) is a

2 A follow-up to this paper by Chua and Felsenthal can be found in Homo Oeconomicus, vol.
25 (2008).